Thank you for being a Gates Notes Insider. I feel lucky that I get to connect with so many people like you. -Bill Gates

Not a Gates Notes Insider yet? Sign up

spacer

LOG IN

SIGN UP

EMAILPASSWORD

Forgot?

Log in

Or sign up with your social account:

Log in

Log in

Logout:

spacer

Become a Gates Notes Insider

Join the Gates Notes community to comment on stories, access exclusive content, participate in giveaways, and more.

Already an Insider? Log in

spacer

LOG IN

SIGN UP

Sign up with your social account:

Sign up

Sign up

Or sign up with email:

TITLE

FIRST NAME

LAST NAME

EMAIL

This email is already registered. Enter a new email, try signing in or retrieve your password

PASSWORD

ADDRESS

Why are we collecting this information? Gates Notes may send a welcome note or other exclusive Insider mail from time to time. Additionally, some campaigns and content may only be available to users in certain areas. Gates Notes will never share and distribute your information with external parties.

ADDRESS LINE 1

Bill may send you a welcome note or other exclusive Insider mail from time to time. We will never share your information.

ADDRESS LINE 2

CITY

STATE / PROVINCE / REGION

ZIP / POSTAL CODE

COUNTRY

Sign up

Join the Gates Notes community to access exclusive content, comment on stories, subscribe to your favorite topics and more.We will never share or spam your email address. For more information see our Sign Up FAQ.By clicking "Sign Up" you agree to the Gates Notes Terms of Use / Privacy Policy.

Deactivating your account will unsubscribe you from Gates Notes emails, and will remove your profile and account information from public view on the Gates Notes. Please allow for 24 hours for the deactivation to fully process. You can sign back in at any time to reactivate your account and restore its content.

Deactivate My Acccount

Go Back

Your Gates Notes account has been deactivated.

Come back anytime.

Welcome back

In order to unsubscribe you will need to sign-in to your Gates Notes Insider account

Once signed in just go to your Account Settings page and set your subscription options as desired.

Sign In

Request account deletion

We’re sorry to see you go. Your request may take a few days to process; we want to double check things before hitting the big red button. Requesting an account deletion will permanently remove all of your profile content. If you’ve changed your mind about deleting your account, you can always hit cancel and deactivate instead.

Submit

Cancel

Thank You! Your request has been sent

Please complete your account verification. Resend verification email.

This verification token has expired.

Your email address has been verified. Update my profile.

Your account has been deactivated. Sign up to re-activate your account.

India Day 2: Making a Better Pigeonpea

I have to admit: I’d never given much thought to pigeonpea and pearl millet before last week. But on my second day in India last week I got a fascinating lesson in how work with those crops is helping the livelihoods of some of the world’s poorest farmers.

After the meetings in New Delhi that I covered in my last post, we flew to Hyderabad to visit ICRISAT (short for International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics), an agricultural research center supported by our foundation that focuses on crops grown in semi-arid climates, particularly certain cereals and legumes.

In the car from the airport, Sam Dryden, a senior fellow at our foundation, tutored me on legumes. They’re part of a family of plants that includes peanuts, soybeans, and peas. One defining characteristic of legumes is that their seeds, the peas and beans we eat, grow inside of pods. Beyond their importance as a high-protein food source, legumes are valued for their ability to enrich soil with nitrogen, which plants also use for food. That makes them a helpful neighbor to crops like maize and sorghum, and it means farmers can get two crops out of a field that might have typically grown just one.

The pigeonpea is a member of the legume family. Little known in the U.S., it’s an important crop in eastern and southern African, India, and other parts of Asia. The seed is used in a variety of foods such as dal, and its leaves and stems are an important feed for farm animals.

It’s also an example of what agricultural development people call an orphan crop, a crop that’s important to many of the world’s poorest people yet largely ignored by the big agriculture companies. Those companies focus on high-value crops like corn and soy that are building blocks of rich-world diets and industry. As a result, their research has boosted yields of those crops by making them more resistant to insects, disease, and drought. The orphans haven’t seen many, if any, of those kinds of improvements.

That’s where ICRISAT comes in. It focuses on coaxing higher productivity out of these neglected crops.

ICRISAT’s work with the pigeonpea is a great example. Traditionally, the varieties grown in Africa were low-yielding and susceptible to disease and pests. The plant’s small seeds also didn’t match the preferences of African farmers and consumers. The ICRISAT researchers described to me how they worked with other agriculture institutes and African government researchers to create a better pigeonpea. After decades of breeding, they developed the world’s first hybrid varieties – 23 so far -- with higher yields, faster cooking time, and a resistance to Fusarium wilt, a fungal disease.

The improvements mean that some African farmers have tripled their output to 1,200 kilograms per hectare since they started planting the improved seeds.

The results of that productivity are being felt in places like Ethiopia, Tanzania, Malawi, and Kenya. Of course, there’s a risk in raising yields: What if the increased supply drives down the price? Fortunately, farmers in those countries are now selling pigeonpea to India, which imports over 254,000 tons of the crop annually—a market so big that it can absorb the extra supply without affecting the price. Other changes—like connecting exporters directly to farmers—are also buoying prices. ICRISAT said that African farmers got about 80 cents per kilogram for the beans last year versus 20 cents per kilogram in 2005.

They also get insurance with the crop: Pigeonpea outlives maize in very dry conditions so when a drought strikes, farmers that plant both can rely on the hardier bean to survive.

The risk of drought drives a lot of research at ICRISAT since the dryland tropics it specializes in will absolutely see hotter, drier conditions in the coming decades. We owe it to the 2 billion people who live in those regions to develop drought-tolerant crops that can handle climate change. ICRISAT researchers are trying to meet that challenge through work on sorghum and pearl millet. We’ll tell that story later in a video from my visit.